Finding your soul mate or even just a one-night stand can all be done digitally now – there’s an app for that. Several, in fact. But in order to find the best match, you need to turn over a lot of extremely personal information. You probably also need to let the app track your location, so you’re only matching people within some acceptable distance. You would hope that dating apps would be better than other apps at securing your private data… but are they? And are these services selling my data to advertisers? Today I answer these questions and many more with Zoë MacDonald from Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included team who recently published a full report on this topic.

Interview Notes

• Privacy Not Included report on dating apps: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/data-hungry-dating-apps-are-worse-than-ever-for-your-privacy/ 


• Mozilla Foundation: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?form=donate-header 


• Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/ 


• Falling out of love with dating apps: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/28/its-quite-soul-destroying-how-we-fell-out-of-love-with-dating-apps 


• Using dating apps to locate someone: https://www.techradar.com/pro/privacy-flaw-in-top-dating-apps-could-have-revealed-user-location-down-to-2-metres 


• How to freeze your credit: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/credit-freeze-now-is-the-time/ 

Further Info

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Table of Contents

Use these timestamps to jump to a particular section of the show.

• 0:57:02 : Wrap-up and looking ahead


• 0:02:06 : Freeze your credit!


• 0:04:19 : How do modern dating apps work, exactly?


• 0:08:19 : How do they find compatible matches?


• 0:10:34 : Do these apps require constant access to your current location?


• 0:14:50 : How much information used by these apps is inferred vs explicitly requested?


• 0:17:59 : Do these apps use inferred data to weed out bad actors?


• 0:20:36 : How did you decide which apps to evaluate?


• 0:23:54 : What were your key takeaways and most alarming findings?


• 0:25:57 : Do apps owned by the same parent company have similar privacy policies?


• 0:27:28 : How transparent are these apps about sharing your data?


• 0:29:08 : Was there any correlation between app cost and monetizing your data?


• 0:31:20 : Are dating apps better about securing your personal data?


• 0:33:53 : Do any of the dating apps offer end-to-end encryption of DMs?


• 0:35:40 : Do these services try to keep you from leaving the app?


• 0:39:03 : Once you find a match, can you get a refund for unused subscription time?


• 0:40:28 : How do new AI features on dating apps affect your privacy?


• 0:43:30 : Have there been any major dating service data breaches?


• 0:45:05 : How bad are these apps for romance scams like ‘big butchering’?


• 0:47:10 : If I still want to use a dating app, how do I maximize my privacy?


• 0:51:19 : Can I use a service on the web only (no app)? Can I delete my data?


• 0:54:20 : How well do dating apps actually work, in terms of finding a mate?